Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess

First published: 1964

Type of work: Pseudo-biographical fiction

Time of work: The Elizabethan period

Locale: Stratford and London

Principal Characters:

• William Shakespeare, the protagonist, a poet, playwright, and lover
• Anne Hathaway, his wife
• The Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, his patron and sometime lover
• Fatimah, /
• Mistress Lucy, /
• The Dark Lady, his muse, obsession, and torment

The Novel

Anthony Burgess’ novel provides a rich, deeply imaginative picture of the inner world of William Shakespeare. From the subtitle, “A Story of Shakespeare’s Love-Life,” one anticipates an attempt to resolve those various Shakespearean mysteries—Who was the narcissistic “young man” of the sonnets? Who was the Dark Lady? What was the relationship between the three?—and from Burgess’ dedication of his “farewell lecture” (this novel) to those students “who complained that Shakespeare had nothing to give to the East,” one finds even richer speculation on man in a mystic, fatal Eastern strain. The novel begins on a Good Friday in the late 1570’s. The stripling Will Shakespeare wanders Stratford, delivering gloves for his father, contemplating his destiny, and playing with language in his mind—metaphors, conceits, puns, all come tumbling forth. While the structure of the novel follows the known events of Shakespeare’s life, Burgess’ emphasis is on the intimate intertwining of Shakespeare’s love life and his creative, generative powers.

Perhaps the most significant love encounter in young Will’s life is that which leads him, unwilling, into early marriage. After an evening’s drunken frivolity on a May night, he awakes to find himself embraced by a strange older woman, the Anne whose male relatives will force him to marry. In Will’s parlance: “He was in a manner tricked, coney-caught, a court-dor to a cozening cotquean. So are all men, first gulls, later horned gulls, and so will ever be all men, amen.” Anne’s “Arden” looks, her gingery hair, milk-white skin, and sharp nose give Will an obsessive hatred for that sort of English prettiness, and he muses on darker goddesses. Unhappily married, quickly plunged into paternity, and unsuited to the glover’s craft, Will finds himself at a crossroads.

One road out of obscurity is pointed out during a chance meeting with a gentleman who, delighted with Will’s Latin learning, invites him to tutor his sons. While this episode in Will’s life concludes with a comedy of errors involving his master’s twin sons, it does clarify his goals: “I am, I think, a poet. I was, though briefly, a schoolmaster.” He tries law-clerking and learns history and French and a sublime insight: “This realm is ruled by words.... Words, pretences, fictions.” At last, goaded by intolerable demands from Anne, he escapes to London and the world of the theater.

Burgess picks up the rich golden thread of Shakespeare’s London life and weaves a picture of his new alliances and loves, growing mastery of stagecraft and playwriting, and success and patronage. At the same time, the sordid, decadent side of town and court are evoked: the decay of the Virgin Queen, the plots and machinations of Essex, the grisly execution of the Jew Lopez at Tyburn, a city racked with plague, deformity, and syphilis. In all this blackness, Shakespeare’s obsession with “The Dark Lady” grows. Burgess shows how closely Shakespeare’s loves link with his labors; his sonnets urging the young Southampton to marry (even as the author declares his love) make way for praise of his dark lady, and the overwhelming suspicion that the two are lovers through his introduction leads to anguished outpourings of poetry. In the theater, his vision, too, darkens. Finally, overtaken by venereal disease, Shakespeare speaks in first-person narrative in the epilogue and describes “the irony of a poet’s desperately wringing out the last of his sweetness while the corrosives closed in.” In the epilogue, too, comes the fusion of Burgess’ aims in the novel. He has Shakespeare answer the major question: “You wish to know how ventriloquial all this is, who is really speaking? This is no impersonation, ladies and gentlemen.” Burgess hints that Shakespeare’s illegitimate son by his dark mistress had been sent back to her Eastern homeland and that Shakespeare’s lineage lives on, perhaps in a form of reincarnation—an interesting invention to cap a most imaginative foray into the unknown.

The Characters

Burgess develops the character of William Shakespeare primarily through the use of language associated with Shakespeare himself, a technique that enhances the verisimilitude of this remarkable novel. Young Will’s thoughts and speeches use the language of Venus and Adonis (1593), the early comedies, and Romeo and Juliet (1595-1596) to illustrate a youth’s dreams of love and recognition. Next, as Shakespeare strides toward success, Burgess uses the metaphors and coinages of power and confidence so prevalent in the plays of history and imperial theme, the feliciter audax of those victorious years. Following Shakespeare’s bitterest disappointments—his son Hamnet’s death, his wife’s infidelity, his own failures in love and health—again his language changes: “So I started a play on Troilus and Cressida in disgust that man should be born in baseness and nastiness and my sickness found me a new language for its expression—jerking harsh words, a delirium of coinages and grotesque fusions.” At the last comes the language of redemption or, failing that, ennoblement of man’s suffering. The gentler language encompasses the themes of The Tempest (1611).

As Burgess chronicles Shakespeare’s life, he imaginatively solves cruxes along the way. Shakespeare’s actions and reactions seem logical in terms of the “proof” in the plays and poems themselves. It is easy to accept the presence of “Greasy Joan” in the Shakespeare kitchen or recognize the jealous ravings when Shakespeare discovers another man in his wife’s arms. This incident, too, helps the reader solve the old mystery of Shakespeare’s leaving his wife nothing in his will but their marriage bed; “even the bed she hath contaminated,” to quote Othello, the Moor of Venice (1604).

Shakespeare’s patron and brief passion, the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, is the only other male character given full development but only through Shakespeare’s eyes. Although there are myriad characters, more than enough to people a Renaissance stage, the reader tends to note quickly their identities merely as historical personages—Good Queen Bess, the Earl of Essex, “Kit” Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Richard Burbage, Edward Alleyn, and William Kempe. Shakespeare and Southampton seem to occupy a midpoint where court and theater collide. Southampton is Shakespeare’s opposite; the young aristocrat patronizes the older man of genius. Shakespeare at once despises and desires the man he sees as both effete and powerful. Again, the reader must turn to the sonnet cycle, dedicated to “Mr. W. H.” (Burgess explains this transposition of the initials of the name Henry Wriothesley by alluding to Southampton’s disgust that he is urged always to put his family name first and marry), to see the development of attitudes.

Shakespeare’s women also represent a system of opposites. On the one hand is the fair, shrewish Anne, whose Arden respectability and ordinary appearance mask a Xantippe of rare, obscene power. On the other is the dark, slumberous Fatimah, whose Eastern, exotic looks make her the very unicorn of muses. Anne is all action and catalyst; like a Fury, she drives Will out of youth’s bachelordom into stale marriage, out of marriage and Stratford into a strange indenture under Southampton. Shakespeare’s disgust with Anne fans his passion for Fatimah. Sadly, Fatimah is not a generous, loving mistress; she is greedy for money and entertainment, treacherous in becoming Southampton’s lover as well, and ultimately, she transmits the venereal disease that kills the poet. Yet Shakespeare loves her unto madness; his infatuation with her form of beauty finds its way into countless verses, the most obvious and memorable being the sonnet from which Burgess takes his title, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” Other discourses include sonnet 127, “In the old age black was not counted fair,” and Berowne’s defense of his dark lady in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1594-1595). Burgess sees in these tormenting relationships the power that generates Shakespeare’s genius in poetry and drama.

Critical Context

Nothing Like the Sun emerged in 1964 during a period of copious writing activity; Burgess wrote at least one or two novels a year during the 1960’s, including his most famous and controversial, A Clockwork Orange (1962). While Burgess’ novels span a variety of time periods (from biblical Nazareth to the future) and involve every sort of character (fictional, historical, and mythic), they grapple with similar thematic materials and explore the myriad possibilities of language. Whether Burgess is inventing a futuristic slang for Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange or mastering Shakespearean subtleties, his grasp of language is notable.

Other concerns include religious and philosophical questions, particularly the source of evil in the world and man’s response to its presence, the role of sexuality in the life of the artist, and satiric evaluations of political systems. Burgess’ is one of the widest-ranging artists in fiction; no matter how outrageous or unusual his subject and approach, he freely interprets its message to the reader.

Bibliography

Bergonzi, Bernard. The Situation of the Novel, 1970.

Burgess, Anthony. “Genesis and Headache,” in Afterwords: Novelists on Their Novels, 1968. Edited by Thomas McCormack.

Coale, Samuel. Anthony Burgess, 1981.

DeVitis, A. A. Anthony Burgess, 1972.